Nate-Silver-style predictions of who will win the Tonys

[Figbash]

Posted: 6/7/19 at 11:20pm

Just for fun, I made a predictive model of who will win 8 of the musical-based Tony awards, using the same exact method used on Nate Silver's 538 website to predict the Oscars (which isn't too different from how they predict elections):

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-our-oscars-tracker-works/

In essence it assigns points to each of the predecessor awards - Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle etc - based on how well they predicted the winner of that category in the past, in my case in every Tony race since 2000. Then if a Tony nominee wins that award, it gets those points, or 1/4 of the points if it was nominated and lost.

The model predicts:

• Hadestown will win Best Original Musical
• Kiss Me, Kate will win Best Revival
• Rachel Chavkin will win Best Director
• Tootsie will win Best Score
• Santino Fontana will win Best Actor
• Stephanie J. Block will win Best Actress
• Andre De Shields will win Best Featured Actor
• Ali Stroker will win Best Featured Actress

According to some Tony prediction I read, most of these are pretty obvious frontrunners, which is a good thing for my model. We'll have to see on Sunday about its more surprising picks: Tootsie for best score, and Kiss Me Kate for best revival.

See how I did it, and some cool graphs explaining the individual predictions, here!

https://github.com/drsaunders/tony-award-prediction/blob/master/tony-award-prediction.ipynb

[GeorgeandDot]

Posted: 6/7/19 at 11:27pm

This is neat, except that Hadestown wasn't eligible for most of the non-Tony awards this year because it was nominated in a previous year for its off Broadway run. This kind of throws off the data I would think.

[itsjustmejonhotmailcom]

Posted: 6/7/19 at 11:52pm

Can you do it with plays too?

[Figbash]

Posted: 6/7/19 at 11:58pm

That's a good point. Looking over the data though, I think the only award the off-broadway rule affects is Drama Desk, and Hadestown didn't win any off-broadway - it was nominated for Best Musical, but that wouldn't have affected the results much, just making it slightly more of a frontrunner. But there may be biases towards broadway, and it just might have gotten better. Can you think of other cases where an offbroadway run might have artificially removed it from the running? Thanks for saying my analysis is neat!

[JBroadway]

Posted: 6/8/19 at 12:20am

Figbash said: "That's a good point. Looking over the data though, I think the only award the off-broadway ruleaffects is Drama Desk, and Hadestowndidn't win any off-broadway - it was nominated for Best Musical, but that wouldn't have affected the results much, just making it slightly more of a frontrunner. But there may be biases towards broadway, and it just might have gotten better. Can you think of other cases where an offbroadway run might have artificially removed it from the running?Thanks for saying my analysis is neat!"

 

A couple things:

1. The Drama Desks DO in fact demonstrate a very blatant bias toward Broadway (I went on a whole rant about it once the Drama Desk Thread)

2. It’s very common these days for shows to premier off-Broadway, and then be ineligible for the Drama Desk when it transfers Broadway in a later season. This happened with Band’s Visit, Dear Evan Hansen, Hamilton, and Fun Home, all 4 of which won the Tony for Best Musical, but Hamilton was the only one to win the Drama Desk. The other 3 all lost the Drama Desk in favor of a Broadway show from that season.